Sprout Social

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Do not build this. Listening across a whole platform is the product, and access to it is sold rather than earned.

Monitoring mentions, keywords and conversations you are not part of requires a firehose-level agreement with each network. Those agreements are expensive, restricted, and not available to an individual developer. Scraping instead breaks terms, gets accounts restricted, and stops working the week the markup changes.

WHEN TO KEEP PAYING
- You genuinely act on mentions you were not tagged in
- A team with approvals, a shared inbox and reporting somebody outside the team reads

CHECK THE PRICE AGAINST THE USE
- This is one of the most expensive subscriptions on the list. If it is being used as a scheduler, that is a very costly scheduler, and cheaper ones are covered under Buffer and Later elsewhere in this catalogue

WHAT YOU CAN BUILD, HONESTLY
- **Mentions you are tagged in**, which the official APIs do give you. That is most of what needs answering
- **Your own posting archive** with metrics collected on a schedule and appended rather than overwritten, so a network changing what it reports does not erase your history
- **Link clicks through your own short domain**, the one number nobody can take away
- **Search on your own site and in your own inbox** for people talking about you where you can actually see them
- A daily digest of all of it, which is what a listening tool is really providing: one place to look

WHAT NOT TO ATTEMPT
Scraping a social platform to reconstruct listening. It is against every network's terms, it puts your accounts at risk, and it produces data you cannot rely on. If listening matters, the licensed access is the only route and that is what the subscription is.

AND THE REPORTING PART
Cross-network reporting is mostly arithmetic once you have your own archive: performance by format and length, with the sample size beside every comparison and the distribution rather than the average, because social performance is heavily skewed and one post dominates a mean.

THE ONE-LINE VERSION
Listening is licensed and cannot be built. If you only schedule and report, you are paying listening prices for a calendar.